Buffalo Jump

Talmud

Chapter 1

Toronto, Ontario Monday, June 26

I woke well before my alarm was due to go off, my hair damp and my skin tacky with sweat that had already dried. Why did I even bother setting one? A dream almost always woke me these days. This morning’s was about Roni Galil again: Roni and me in a hot, dry place, waiting for something to come around the corner. Sensing it, hearing it, dreading it. Our weapons at port arms, straining to see through eyes stung by whipping dust and sand.

On this morning, for once, I woke before the dream climaxed. My lips were cracked and stuck to each other and my eyes dried out from having a fan pointed at them all night. I had a small air-conditioning unit sitting on the floor of my bedroom, its plug curled around it like a snake. I’d brought it with me after the breakup but it didn’t fit the window in the new place and I didn’t have money yet for a new one.

I got out of bed and opened the door that led to the concrete balcony and stepped out. Stretched my right arm until it ached—which didn’t take long. I had an unobstructed 180-degree view of the west side of the city, from the lake at the south end to the forested ravines that line the Don Valley Parkway heading north. Not even July and we were three days into a lung-buckling heat wave, with a great humid mass hanging over the city like a tent. The sun was a weak lamp behind damp muslin, smog diffusing its pale light into a harsh glare.

The media had been warning the elderly and people with asthma to stay indoors. Being neither, I chanced a few breaths. The air smelled like it was wafting out of a grave.

I had been in this apartment less than two months and the place itself was nothing special, the kind you see in any Toronto high-rise built in the sixties and seventies. The kind of place a guy lands in when he’s been turfed, which I had been two months ago.

It had an L-shaped living room/dining room combo, galley kitchen, decent-sized bedroom, utilitarian bathroom. Parquet flooring throughout. But it was rent-controlled—very reasonable by Toronto standards—and in a great location: Broadview and Danforth, at the western boundary of Riverdale, just across the Don Valley from downtown.

The best thing about it, what sealed it for me the minute I walked in, was the view: floor-to- ceiling windows facing west, nothing between me and the city skyline. It was spectacular at night, when the gleaming towers of the financial district seemed to rise straight out of the darkness of the valley. But even in the morning, it could take your breath away—if the smog didn’t take it first.

I went inside and put on a pot of dark roast, then spent twenty minutes rehabbing my right arm, using an old inner tube looped around a closet door knob. Stretching it back and forth to work the injured triceps. Taking it easy at first, then moving farther away to increase the tension. The muscles had been damaged when a bullet tore through them two months earlier. My surgeon said at the time I was lucky: the 9-millimetre slug had broken no bones, severed no blood vessels, damaged no nerves. His definition of luck, not mine.

My name is Jonah Geller and I’m a consultant with Beacon Security, a firm that offers everything from surveillance to missing person searches, pre-nups to employment checks. Up until a few months ago, you could say I’d been something of a rising star there. More specifically, until the Ensign case. Or, as some of my less tactful colleagues took to calling it, the Tobacco Debacle.

The assignment had seemed simple enough—a routine undercover job as a security guard at the Ensign Tobacco Company, one of the country’s largest cigarette makers. Our plan called for me to insinuate myself into the graces of two bent security men planning to hijack a truckload of cigarettes with the help of mobsters practised in this deceptive art. Make sure I was behind the wheel of the truck when it was taken. Be there when the load was turned over to a nasty crime boss named Marco Di Pietra. Stay out of the way when officers from the Task Force on Traditional Organized Crime swooped down and made the arrests. Smile and accept whatever accolades and promotions came my way.

But as we Jews have been saying for centuries, Der menstch tracht un Gott lacht … man plans and God laughs. Or as my grandmother would say when holding my grandfather in particularly sour regard: Man proposes. And God disposes.

Since the Tobacco Debacle, I had been firmly ensconced in the corporate doghouse. The official line was I was on desk duty until my arm fully healed. Hands up if you believe that one. The truth is I blew the case by making a mistake a raw beginner shouldn’t have made. As a result, Di Pietra and his chief enforcer, a half-Italian, half-Irish hood named Dante Ryan, walked out of court after taking up less than ten minutes of the judge’s time.

All because in a moment of weakness, I’d been torn between my relationship and the job, and in that moment the relationship won out.

At least that wouldn’t be a problem again. Not only had the case derailed my career and left me with a gunshot wound, it also proved to be the last straw for my girlfriend—now ex-girlfriend—Camilla Lauder. The lovely Camilla seized the opportunity to dump me while I was still in my hospital bed, stoned (but not nearly enough) on Percocet.

And badly as things went for me, they went far worse for a cop named Colin MacAdam. I doubt his doctor told him he was lucky.

I had a quick breakfast of cantaloupe, cereal and coffee. I felt troubled by the dream I’d had—fragments of it flashing in my mind, with no coherent narrative, just familiar sounds and images in an all-too-familiar place. Thudding hooves. The cries of angry men. The higher-pitched cries of children. Echoes of gunfire and boots on stone.

Christ. Why was I even trying to remember? The dream never ended well. Especially not for Roni. I should get a morning paper delivered, I told myself. Either that or read the back of the cereal box. Get out of that place in my head where dreams clung like the last webbed patches of morning fog.

By eight o’clock, I was dressed in light summer clothing—khakis, a white cotton shirt and sandals—and out the door, hoping to get into work early like a good dog. The elevator let me out in the parking garage where I kept my white Camry. According to Car and Driver magazine, it’s one of the most common cars on Canada’s roads. Investigators in books and movies might drive hot red Ferraris, vintage Corvettes, metallic Porsches and other cars that in real life would get spotted three minutes into a tail. Good luck to them. Give me an unremarkable but reliable yawner any time.

I slipped the key in and turned it and was greeted by a grinding, coughing sound, like something you’d hear on an emphysema ward. I tried it again. Same result.

So much for reliable.

I had owned the car only six weeks. Until Camilla torpedoed me, we had co-owned a silver Accord. But she’d been making the payments on her credit card to collect travel points, so the car was hers until further disposition, as was the little semi we had bought on a quiet Riverdale street just south of where I lived now. Not only did the law favor her because of her gender—like Camilla needed any help—but my lawyer, supplied by my brother Daniel’s firm, was more or less human. Hers was all wolverine. You couldn’t fight him with motions; you needed a leghold trap and a 12-gauge.

I dug out my cell and called CAA. A recorded message said they were experiencing a high volume of calls, and wait time for service was averaging ninety minutes. It told me my call was important and cautioned me not to hang up as that would cost me my place in line. I hung up anyway and called Joe Avila, the guy who’d sold me the car.

Joe owned a body shop and used-car lot on Eastern Avenue. A year ago, his sixteen-year-old daughter ran away, fed up with her parents’ strict Old World rules about dating, makeup, tattoos and jeans that exposed pubic hair and butt cracks. Joe came to Beacon, terrified that his sheltered Mariela would be chewed up and spat out by the world beyond Little Azores: beaten, raped, impregnated, infected or all of the above. I found her crashing in a squalid bachelor apartment in the east end. Mariela mustered some bravado and attitude in front of her friends, but over coffee she confided that the only thing scarier than her current situation was what her parents would do to her if she went back. I reassured her that all they wanted was for her to be safe. Eventually she relented and I drove her home. When I needed a car, I got the Camry from Joe at a family price.

When Joe answered, I told him the family jewel wouldn’t start.

You try CAA? he asked.

Ninety minutes at least.

Probably not the battery anyway, he said. I put in a brand new reconditioned one when you bought it.

Brand new reconditioned. I would have told Joe it was an oxymoron but what if he misunderstood? The man can hoist a car without the benefit of hydraulics.

Joe told me he was stuck alone at the shop until nine-thirty at least because his goddamn nephew had slept in and still hadn’t showed up. He wouldn’t be able to get to my place before ten. Okay, Joe. I’ll cab it downtown. Can you meet me here after work and have a look?

He hesitated. Oh, man, Jonah. So many cars overheat on days like this, I could work all night. I’d be passing up a big payday.

How’s Mariela doing? Still getting straight As in school?

Joe sighed. Okay, okay. I get the point. I’ll be at your place around six.

By eight-thirty, I was standing on the west side of Broadview, trying to hail a southbound cab. There were plenty going my way but all had passengers. I spotted an empty northbound hack but he had nowhere to turn around and waved me off.

By eight-forty, my shirt was clinging to the small of my back and I was no closer to work. Showing up late could only dim the view Beacon held of me. I was beginning to weigh my carjacking options when a 504 streetcar rumbled into view. Its route went south along Riverdale Park before heading west over the valley toward downtown. It would take me within a block of the office.

The streetcar was packed. I dropped in my fare, then took a deep breath and tried to squeeze myself down the aisle. It was like trying to blitz an offensive line. Every other person was sporting a backpack big enough to hide a body in. Most also wore headphones that kept them from hearing words like Excuse me. Pressed against bodies overly ripe in the heat, I fought to protect my right arm and keep my balance as the streetcar ground down Broadview. We went past the statue of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, where elderly Chinese in wide-brimmed straw hats were performing tai chi on the grassy eastern slope of Riverdale Park. I could only envy their ease of motion and the amount of space they had to move in. At Gerrard, nearly half the passengers got off, heading to shops in Chinatown East, east-bound and west-bound streetcars, the library on the corner or the Don Jail behind it, its dark Gothic wing hidden from view by a newer brick extension.

When the aisle cleared, there was an empty seat next to a well-dressed man reading the Report on Business. I was about to sit down when I saw an elderly woman facing the other way, her thin hand clenched tightly around a chrome pole, blue veins over bony knuckles. Even in this weather, she wore a wool coat. I tapped her shoulder softly and indicated the seat. She smiled and was about to sit when the streetcar lurched away from the stop. As she clutched at the pole to keep her balance, a thin man in jeans and a sleeveless denim vest swung into the seat I had offered.

He was about my age, which is thirty-four, but craggy and hard-looking, his ropy arms marked with dozens of crude ink tattoos. He shook his lank brown hair out of his eyes and propped his left foot up on the back of the seat in front of him.

That seat was for the lady, I said. He ignored me and shook the hair out of his eyes again.

She needs it more than you, I said.

That so? He gave me what was supposed to be a withering glare. Shook the hair. Happens I had a rough fuckin’ night.

I briefly entertained the idea of shaking his hair for him. Look—

Just fuck off, okay? he spat. Just leave me the fuck alone, ya fuckin’ kike.

Kike? Had he really said kike?

The old lady clutched the pole even more tightly. The businessman in the window seat buried his nose deeper in his paper. A few straphangers stepped away from us.

I guess he had.

I’m not what you’d call an observant Jew. I eat matzoh on Passover but have been known to top it with ham and cheese. My favorite Chinese dish is shrimp in lobster sauce with minced pork, the non-kosher trifecta. Truth be told, I’m an atheist, though I once flirted briefly with agnosticism. But I am a Jew to my marrow and proud of it. I believe in the people, the culture, the community. I especially believe in the concept of tikkun olam: repairing the world, leaving it a better place than you found it. And at that moment, it was my belief that the streetcar would be a better place without this piece of shit on it.

It’s all right, dear, the old lady said to me. I’m getting off at Jarvis.

Doesn’t matter, I told her. This gentleman is going to get up now and give you the seat.

The fuck I am, he said and stuck out the middle finger of his left hand.

In any fight, you take what they give. I grabbed his hand and forced it downward and held it there. Aaah! he said, and who could blame him? It’s a fast, simple move that causes intense pain in the wrist, all but forcing a person upward to try to ease it. As he struggled up out of his seat I kept the pressure on, my left hand free to block a punch—if he could throw one with the pain he was in.

Feel that? I asked.

Aaah!

I’ll take that as a yes. Want more? I pushed harder until he went up on his toes.

Naaa!

We’re going to walk to the exit, I said. You going to make trouble?

Naa-uuh!

We walked toward the rear doors, my arm tight under his left. Two men walking up the aisle arm in arm—hardly uncommon in Toronto. We could have been practising our wedding march.

Next time a lady needs a seat, you’re going to give it to her. He didn’t answer so I pushed the wrist back farther.

Ah! Ah! he said through clenched teeth. Yes.

"And the word kike, you’re going to expunge it from your vocabulary."

I’m what?

You’re going to forget you knew it.

Yeah. Yeah-uhh!

The streetcar stopped at Queen Street. I marched my new friend down onto the first stair, which automatically opened the doors, and gave him a shove. He exited ungracefully and stood on the sidewalk, flexing his hand open and closed, shaking it like there was something stuck to it. There would be numbness and pain, but both would subside in minutes.

Hey! he whined. I got no more carfare, ya prick.

I dug in my pocket and flipped him a toonie and assorted small change.

I’m still short a quarter, he said.

I take no quarter, I said as the doors closed. And I give none.

Jonah Geller. Repairing the world, one asshole at a time.

Chapter 2

Carol Dunn’s smiling muscles were out of commission again. Good morning, Jonah. So glad you could join us.

Carol had been Beacon’s receptionist since it was founded by Graham McClintock after he retired from the Toronto Police Service. Somewhere near fifty, she presided over reception with total devotion to Clint, guarding his privacy and time as though both were more precious than air. She would take on a pack of pit bulls to protect him, and win. She hadn’t spared me so much as a grin since the Ensign case. I had caused grief to Clint and the firm, after all. And here I was waltzing in ten minutes late, without a collared criminal or exonerated innocent to show for it.

Car trouble, I said.

Mm-hmm.

Carol could have buzzed me in but didn’t. I dug out my ID card and swiped it through the magnetic reader fixed to the door jamb.

The Beacon office was open concept: in the centre area were four cube farms of four workstations each, each farm walled off by baffles for privacy and sound insulation. Around the perimeter were offices occupied by unit heads and senior consultants. Not long ago, I had seemed destined for one. Now I felt lucky they hadn’t stuck me in a rain-soaked doghouse in the parking lot. Since returning from my four-week injury leave, I had been given nothing but supporting roles. I’d helped other consultants run background checks on prospective employees or spouses. I’d traced paper and money trails left by embezzlers, bail jumpers and deadbeat dads. I’d pored over transcripts of other people’s interviews; reviewed videotapes to be used as evidence in other people’s cases. I had done everything but lead a case of my own.

This was hurting my income in equal measure to my pride. The firm billed clients by the hour, and the more hours you logged, the better you did. Put in enough overtime on surveillance or undercover jobs, and you could earn a good living. At the moment, I was being offered neither.

I shared my cube farm with Jennifer Raudsepp, Andy Robb and François Paradis. Franny was fluently bilingual and spent a lot of time on the road, working cases in eastern and northern Ontario, which had the largest francophone populations in the province. This week, he was working in town, something to do with a nursing home. Andy was a wiry little guy, five-seven and 130 pounds, and terrific at undercover work. He could blend into any setting without drawing attention to himself. He didn’t talk much but rarely missed a word other people said.

Then there was Jenn, a six-foot blonde who liked to tell people she was the shortest of four Estonian sisters. She was thirty but could pass for early twenties, with eyes as blue as a prairie sky and a smile that could make a man walk happily into a lamppost. She was also, to the chagrin of sighted straight men everywhere, openly gay. She lived with a lovely nurse practitioner named Sierra Lyons, and I got along better with both of them than I ever had with Camilla. As a trained investigator, I suppose that should have told me something.

When I first joined Beacon five years earlier, I had assumed most of the employees would be beefy ex-cops who’d put in their thirty years and wanted to top up their pensions. Clint quickly put that notion to rest.

Cops might know how to conduct an investigation, he said, but they’ve always had the badge to back them up. The authority to enter someone’s home, search the place, compel them to answer questions. We don’t have that luxury. People don’t want to talk to us, they close the door and that’s that. We have to be good talkers and better listeners. If the job is surveillance or security, give me an ex-cop. If it’s money tracking, give me an ex-accountant or banker. But for undercover work or interviews, I’d hire an actor or a social worker before an old cop.

You were a cop, I said.

Yes, and after I hired myself I realized my mistake and vowed not to repeat it.

So we had people like Andy, who before joining Beacon had been a bartender, a hot walker at Woodbine Racetrack, a warehouse worker and a night watchman. People like Jenn, who had been a member of a women’s sketch comedy troupe until she realized she’d always be looking up at the poverty line. And people like me, who’d had more false starts and accidental careers than I care to admit, including waiter, construction worker, ski guide and martial arts instructor. Among other things.

I was just settling into my chair when Andy and Jenn exited one of the meeting rooms. Hi guys, I said. Andy said hi—a mouthful for him—and Jenn gave me the kind of smile that made me wish she were straight or that I were Sierra Lyons.

How you doing? she asked.

Not too bad, I lied. Where’s Franny? Monday morning flu again?

Haven’t heard a word.

I fired up my computer and logged on to our media monitoring software package. If Beacon Security had been mentioned anywhere in print or broadcast media, transcripts would be waiting for me.

What my career had come to: a glorified clerk.

It wasn’t hard to predict the lead story in today’s papers: the shooting death of Kylie Warren outside the Eaton Centre, at the city’s busiest corner, in the middle of a sun-kissed Sunday afternoon. Kylie was the kind of young woman Toronto loves: athletic, blonde, an achiever from a good Leaside family with a bright future on Bay Street after completing both a law degree and the Canadian Securities Course.

Each paper had slightly differing accounts, depending on the witnesses they interviewed, but a rough consensus emerged: one group of four or five black teens walking south on Yonge came across another similar-sized group walking north. Words were spoken. Respect not paid. Shoves exchanged. Guns pulled. As one man fled across the street, another fired three shots at him. Two shots hit the wall of the restaurant Kylie was leaving. The third took most of her head off. The shooter had been identified as Dwight Junior Torrance, whose lengthy record included numerous assault, drug and weapons charges. He had been deported to his native Jamaica twice already, but kept slipping back into Canada, no doubt for the climate.

The widest coverage was in the city’s only tabloid, the Clarion, since the shooting brought together three of its most urgent concerns: guns, good-looking girls and the ineffectiveness of the left-leaning latte-loving mayor and Toronto elite. Year of the Gun! the headline screamed. The coverage included a two-page spread in which every person shot to death in June—a record twenty-six—was memorialized. Almost every face was young and black. Some darker-skinned, some lighter. Some with shaved heads, some with dreads or braided rows. Apart from Kylie Warren, there was only one other white face: Kenneth Page, a fifty-two-year-old pharmacist with a glorious head of gray hair and ruddy complexion, shot to death in a carjacking. Killed for nothing, like Kylie.

Until very recently, guns had been relatively rare in Toronto, whose citizens tended to kill each other with knives, beer bottles, fists, boots or any blunt object at hand. But guns were everywhere now, sweeping out of pockets, waistbands, glove compartments, backpacks and school lockers, bearing down on people like Kylie and Kenneth Page. Like me and Colin MacAdam.

I’d been on the other side of guns once—the shooting side—and hadn’t liked it any better. I knew all too well what guns could do, to both the victim and the shooter. I told Clint when I took the job that I wouldn’t accept any assignment that required me to carry a gun. He laughed and told me to relax, that Toronto wasn’t L.A.

Of course, he probably wouldn’t trust me with a stapler now, but that was fine with me.

It was lunchtime by the time I finished the media review, including all the weekend editions. I ordered in a roast beef sandwich from the deli on the corner and was just tucking into it when François Paradis made his entrance.

He was a big physical presence, Franny, with a grand black pompadour he vowed never to change and a booming voice that switched effortlessly back and forth between English and French, joking and cursing eloquently in both official languages. He was a few years older than me, kept fit at the gym and seemed to enjoy his life as much as anyone nearing forty without much to show for it. Which could be me if I didn’t pick up my game soon.

Good afternoon, I said.

Like hell, he groaned.

So what is it today? Flu? Asthma acting up?

Neither, he winked. "Her name is LaReine, maudit Christ, and she rode me all night like a bull. Big black girl, eh, has an ass like two melons. Sacrament, I never had it like that before. I’m afraid to take a leak, eh? My thing’s so tired he can’t lift his head to see the toilet. I’m afraid I’ll piss all over my shoes."

Not the Bruno Maglis.

Any coffee going? he said. I need one bad, my friend.

Might be some in the kitchen.

Don’t suppose you’re heading that way.

Don’t suppose so.

Listen, he said, leaning forward and dropping his voice. Can you help me out with one thing?

Like?

The case I’m on, this nursing home thing. I met the client Friday and I was supposed to type up my notes but I had a date Friday after work—

With LaReine?

He looked puzzled. "What? No, no, I met her just last night. Friday was this girl Micheline, friend of my ex-wife. I always wanted to plant her when I was married but I was trying to be a good husband back then. Stupid me, eh? So I ran into her at the track and I went for it, tabernac, and she was everything what I hoped for. Now I just have to make sure my ex finds out about it."

Which ex?

Eh? Oh, Mireille, of course. Vicki doesn’t give a crap anymore.

So you ran into this girl at Woodbine?

Best luck I’ve had there in weeks. I even hit a four-hundred-and-twenty-dollar trifecta.

But you said you had a date.

When?

You said you couldn’t type up your notes because you had a date. But your date was someone you ran into once you were already at the track.

Franny slumped in his chair and threw up his hands with a smile. You got me, he said. Caught me in my own lie. That is why you are a rising star—

Was.

Come on. See how you picked up my little fib?

Butter the other side later, Franny, I said. You bugger off to the track and I have to type up your notes?

Clint said you were here to help if I needed it. And I do. He wheeled his chair closer. I could smell a musk of cologne, booze, coffee and, presumably, LaReine. He handed me a chrome microcassette recorder and said, Double-spaced, please. Before end of business today is fine.

Chapter 3

Buffalo: the previous March

Barry Aiken entered his garage from the laundry room off the kitchen, so it wasn’t until he opened the outside door that he felt the coldness of the rain and the bite of the wind. A raw, late winter day in Buffalo, still a few weeks shy of spring. Barry had to open the garage door by hand because the remote hadn’t worked in weeks: the only loser on Lincoln Parkway getting his face wet opening the door to the outside world.

He heard the rumble of thunder in the distance, felt the dampness in his bones. Shivered and zipped his leather bomber as high as it would go. Barry hated driving to the west side but that’s where Kevin was, and Kevin had the supply; Barry was all demand. He patted his jacket pocket, the inside one that buttoned shut, to make sure he had his wallet. He didn’t like carrying this much cash, but what else was he going to do? Offer to write Kevin a cheque? Ask him if he took plastic? Right, then hang around until he stopped laughing.

Barry aimed his fob at the side of his Honda CR-V and heard it chirp as the lock disengaged. He got in and eased the seat back and adjusted the mirrors. Amy had been the last one